The Borderlands is a porous territory, a locus of hybridity of ethnicity, race, language, and gender, as Anzaludúa poignantly proposes. She sees herself as atravesada por la frontera, split, rajada. Y esa raja, that split, positions her being in a state of open possibilities. It is the Coatlicue state, el estado de la serpent, a mental and physical position that paralyzes and the same time propels one to continue andando. Anzaldúa claims in her writing her Aztec origin; she is from Aztlán, the mythic place of origin of the Mexican people. And she is also from Tejas, EE.UU., colonized in that sense, after the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty. Vive in the border de manera física y mental, su lengua se poliniza with the influence of the tongue of the Anglos and the tongue of the Latinxs. Anzaldúa is frontera in her body. She is queer, rajada también.
Octavio Paz, delving into what it means to be Mexican, describes personalities as masks. Masks are palimpsests: every layer of personality is informed by the sentiment which comes with a word. There is a tension between rajarse and abrirse. “El ideal de la ‘hombría’ consiste en no ‘rajarse’ nunca […] Las mujeres son seres inferiores porque, al entregarse, se abren. Su inferioridad es constitucional y radica en su sexo, en su ‘rajada’, herida que jamás cicatriza” (10). The Christian culture of patriarcado delimits women to their role as mothers (virgin maries) or prostitutes (malinches, malas mujeres, mal habladas).
When the Borderlands is taken as the place of enunciation (Mignolo’s border thinking) we can think about atravesados. “Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go thought the confines of the ‘normal.’” (Anzaldúa 3). The atravesados have the power to subvert the subaltern place of Ninguno. Romper el silencio para que Ninguno hable. Estar rajada is therefore a starting point.
Raja, frontera, abrir, atravesar, hacer hablar a Ninguno… all of these concepts coalesce in an open invitation to movement; an invitation to walk, to cross fronteras, pollinize like bees, migrate like the papalotls, sanar las heridas con conocimiento ancestral. Walking, as Diana Taylor reminds us, is an invitation to think, to decolonize our mind shaped by our thoughts of Western colonizer thinking. ¡Una invitación para estar presente y andar allá donde se demanda nuestra presencia! Being with, dice Jean-Luc Nancy. ¿Con quién? Con los atravesados, como no. Ten thousand people are walking, up the isthmus of a split continent, rajado. Atravesando fronteras para llegar también a su homeland. Andemos con ellxs. Let’s figure out how to walk with them.
Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad. México City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986. Print.Anzaldúa, Gloria. Boderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987. Print.